AustLit

'The forty-eight poems that comprise Alex Skovron’s seventh book-length collection, Letters from the Periphery, are populated by a variety of voices speaking across many settings—from 1960s Sydney to the cafés of today’s Melbourne, from the Trojan War and Byzantine Aleppo to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, from eighteenth-century Lisbon to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth, from the American Civil War to warfronts of our time, and of the future. A richly diverse gathering, this book also marks Skovron’s return to the longer poem—notably the title-sequence, featuring a mysterious stalker versed in philosophy; the suite ‘The Light We Convert’, grounded in the world of nineteenth-century music; and the poet’s translation of the opening Canto from The Divine Comedy.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In A. Frances Johnson’s Save As, poetries of disfigurement braid tropes of ruin: land and country, self and community.

'Shunning earnestness and sanctimony, this distinctive ‘writing after nature’ offers deprecatory wit and an arsenal of intertextual and parodic free-verse techniques. An aluminium can narrates its own lifecycle, speaking of unchecked corporate extraction of aquifers; the Wikipedia entry for ‘Water’ is reframed in past tense, the vital chemical as pure remembrance in a dry world. Donne’s iconic ‘The Sunne Rising’ is retold with a factor 50 smile and more than a gentle nod to an overheated world. Keats’s lakeside withered sedge in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is transplanted to a tired pink lake under Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge. Among these politically playful poems, moving personal elegies are interspersed. These, too, are subtly implicated in ecological crisis; the mourning subject is always part of a bigger picture.

'These poems eschew one-note, passivity-inducing, melancholic lamentation, and invite self-identification and self-critique. Boldly wrestling with the long-armed tradition of modern pastoral romanticism, the collection’s poetic and personal ‘dross scapes’ show urgent engagement with ecological ruin and ecologies of grief.

'Johnson’s compelling poetic agitprop attests that one cannot die of landscape, but one can die of despair over loss of country and home. In demolishing ‘landscape’ and ‘poetries of the natural world’, these poems invite us to confront the real while acknowledging mythic artifice.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'At times a lamentation, at times a celebration, Inheritance is a meditation on loss, displacement, and survival.

'The finely wrought poems in Nellie Le Beau’s Inheritance are intelligent and striking. The poet’s voice is assured as it reels the reader between past and present, between the uncertainty of memory and the crisp precision of observation. Inheritance is an inventive, wide-ranging and vibrant debut collection animated by Le Beau’s capacity for terse, unequivocal phrasing and compelling imagery. – Ella Jeffrey

''Nellie Le Beau’s Inheritance is a psychic exploration of the mediation between past, present and future. The imagery deployed is striking and often surprising, teasing the reader with its unexpected angles and irresolutions. Like the very best poetry, it gives its readers scaffolding to think in new ways. While the individual poems play with different speaker positions and poetic registers, one of the great strengths of the collection is the way it hangs together as a reading experience. I left the manuscript feeling refreshed and as if my mind had been taken on an adventure.' — Ed Wright'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to find horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for elusive balance points between memory and lived terrain, between past and present lives, between grief and enlightenment. They are connecting threads of lived and familial histories, often perceived through remembered or exigent visual portals. 

'This is Marcelle Freiman’s third book of 37 new poems, a number of which have been published in well-known Australian literary journals. There are poems using longer forms or sequences, exploring the fragmented nature of human experience, making patterns and story from lives in the present or those which are lost. Other, shorter lyric forms articulate shards of memory and perception. Throughout the book, themes of loss seek a balance against moments of light.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Hear the Art is the essential poetry-as-art collection, loaded with Richard Tipping’s elegant, wry and telling concrete poems made as sculpture and as picture. He is fascinated by words found within words, and articulating their iterations.

'Tipping works with poetic language in visual forms and physical media ranging from animated neon, slump glass, engraved marble and screenprint to large-scale public sculptures in steel, granite and electric lights. Typographic designs move off the page, becoming independent poem objects until -- while living in the artworld as things -- they are photographed, and return to the page. This book is full of realised ideas, a rich panoply of word art demanding to be seen, heard and remembered.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Off Limits features toads and torched pubs, and the hidden lives of foxes. The title poem suggests spaces that are barred, out of bounds. By extension, the collection probes underground mindscapes and the buried lives of others. Lifts manhole covers, shines a spotlight on the ways the human heart enacts rebellion. 'Tunnel rats' skateboarding in Sydney's drains. Cavers making erotic forays into the forbidden White Bay Power Station. Developers eying off iconic buildings. These poems capture the desperation of commuters trapped on motorways, of long-distance lovers navigating desire between hot chilli sauce and Arizona landscapes. This is the territory of space travel and robots, the wonders of biomimicry and the transcending of our limitations to learn from animals. Wryly ironic about humanity's dream of reinventing itself on other planets, the poet resists the trashing of the one we inhabit. This is poetry of passionate engagement, clear-eyed and firmly earthed.'

Source : publication summary

'From the award-winning author of Blood Universe - poems on pregnancy comes a full-length collection of new poetry: powerful, poignant meditations on family and its origins, parenthood, love and the loss of love. Includes poems shortlisted for the Montreal International and Bridport Prizes.' (Publication summary)

'What’s a life look like when the reader only gets to see the birthdays? The Birthday Scrolls is a memoir of Newcastle bohemian Geoff Nicholls’ birthdays between the ages of 21 and 60. Pre-gentrification Newcastle, bands and parties mingle with visits to psychiatric wards, concerts in Sydney and, as the years go by, work at the Hunter Wetlands Centre, yoga, singing, uni.

'Geoff writes with humour and candour of his passions and foibles, but also of the peaks and troughs of birthdays, including those he winds up celebrating by himself. It’s a brave and poignant set of recollections of a life lived at a tangent to the mainstream, that explores family, loneliness, friendship, and the transcendence to be found in art.' (Publication summary)

'In this fourth major poetry collection, Claire Gaskin re-envisions the myth of Antigone by focusing on her sister Ismene. Assuming the voice of a contemporary Ismene, she asks us to consider what survivable resistance might look like for those who live on after tragedy? What kind of avenues are available to resist autocratic and patriarchal structures of power? How might we imagine a future that is different to our past and instigate real change at both a personal and public level?

'Ismene’s accommodation of and respect for difference is privileged in these poems, as is her credo of care in situations that seem overwhelmingly difficult or impossible: ‘remember those who love you love you still’. The poems identify and expose inner and outer silencing devices and refuse to be silenced. Powerfully evocative and cumulative in its reflective intensity, Ismene’s Survivable Resistance demonstrates how creative engagement can enable connections between the seemingly fragmentary and how poetic form not only provides a crucial means to hear those who have survived abuses of power but can also be the vehicle for change.'(Publication summary)

'The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu of the traditional fourteen. Themes of destruction and loss, hope and wonder, and the pressing fate of an unstable world, are coded like enduring questions into the machinery of these extraordinary poems.

'Albiston's relationship with the sonnet has prevailed since her earliest work, most notably the highly celebrated and award-winning the sonnet according to 'm'.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The Hard Word is the second collection from this respected and influential critic and teacher. The poems contain his trademark conversational tone combined with vivid wit and is the distillation of 12 years of poetry.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Charting surreal and yet familiar worlds where hope and horror co-exist, Monster is ruthless, weird, dark and funny. These 33 stories explore loss, addiction, love and breakdown with unsentimental economy. Stories concern mothers losing or leaving children, relationships dangling by a thread or exploding. Some characters are institutionalised, others are profoundly lonely. Some just wander around — lost, while others are filled with shocking violence. There is joy here, too, and a kind of blazing intimacy in this debut collection of tough, tender and unflinching stories.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Glide is the second part of an eco-poetic project that began with the landmark collection Yuiquimbiang, which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2020

'Louise Crisp’s new collection extends her walking interrogation of environmental destruction in south-eastern Australia; stolen land afflicted by the ongoing colonial practices of logging, mining and land clearing.

'Glide is a series of radical long-form poems which attend to specific East Gippsland ecosystems: endangered gliders of the foothill forests, rare grasslands of the Gippsland Plains, a copper mine on the montane headwaters of the Tambo River, and the historic Brolga country of the Gippsland Lakes’ fringing freshwater wetlands in counterpoint to the Brolga swamps and lagoons of south-western Victoria. Crisp creates an intimate and haunting poetics of inhabitation and dialogue with the more-than-human world.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'D.J. Huppatz's latest collection, Astroturfing for Spring confronts its readers with the dizzying effects of information overload. Disturbing yet playful, its poems re-assemble bits of our mediated culture at the point where selfies, social media and gaming meet capitalism, cosmology and climate change. Rapid shifts and unexpected juxtapositions disrupt the idea of poetry as a transparent mode of communication while celebrating writing's rhyme, rhythm and startling possibilities. The "chance inheritor of a language parasite", D.J. Huppatz is the author of Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattman, 2015). He reads, writes and follows in Melbourne.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Wattison’s poems are always investigative, always humane. They are always willing to take risks. I know of no other Australian poet who writes quite like Meredith Wattison. She choreographs language in a way that is distinctive, deftly filtering moods and complex emotions through her uncanny vision as she aligns a deeply aesthetic mode of perception with the habitual and quotidian. Her language is sculptural and muscular, elegant and biting. Her music is both intense and playful, she can use the seductive registers of her voice to persuade and beguile, move and unsettle, but above all, her work is an enabling moral response to these complex times.
- from the Foreword by Judith Beveridge' (Publication summary)

'Exploring relations to place, ways we receive language as we move in the world, and anxieties of communication, hotel universo particularizes the rendered, the middling and ostensibly universal. Written in Newcastle's suburbs and published here its poems reflect and reside in a politics of location. Despite its interest in the transitory, hotel universo, and poetry more widely, is a place we have come to, 'and never left'.' (Publication summary)

'Gas Deities is the result of a quest for meaning that negates the big ticket items of ego, intellectual fashion and salvation, leaving behind the generative joys of doubt. Using dramatic monologues and the slipperiness of the lyrical I, Wright takes us on a journey through suburban Australia, with the odd overseas excursion, finding magic in the ordinary, and understanding the creativity of erring at the same time as mining the foibles of pretension.' (Publication summary)